Greta Garbo: Divine Star by David Bret

A film insider explores the mystery of the famously enigmatic Greta Garbo

G
reta Garbo, the Hollywood siren of the black-and-white era, famously wanted
to be left alone, so heaven only knows what the solitary star would make of
David Bret’s copious offering. A show-business biographer straight out of
­central casting (he dedicates the book “to my great friend Marlene
Dietrich”), and the author of hagiographic tomes on Joan Crawford and Errol
Flynn among others, Bret is steeped in the Hollywood studio system, its
bitter rivalries and torrid romances. Yet the book’s opening lines drip with
bathos: we learn that the actress was “an enigma” and that she was born
Greta Lovisa Gustaffson at 7.30pm on September 8, 1905, at the Gamla Sodra
BB maternity hospital in Stockholm, and weighed 7½lb. She was also local
marbles champion.

The author, an old-school obsessive, is smarmily conscientious (he gives the
dates for every significant individual on their first mention). Much more to
his detriment is